Making Sense of the Current Expansion of the U.S. Economy: A Long Wave Approach and a Critique

Abstract

Despite the impressive rebounding of the U.S. economy from the long contraction of the 1970s, a number of radical political economists seem to be dismissive, oblivious, or in denial of this significant turnaround. To the extent that they reluctantly acknowledge the recovery, they immediately add that the recovery represents no long-wave expansion, and that it merely represents a transitory" upswing along the long downswing of the 1970s (Brenner 1998, Moseley 1999, O'Hara 2000, as well as most of the proponents of the SSA thesis). What do we make of the glaring gap between the reality of the current expansion of the U.S. economy and the perceptions of these economists of that expansion? Our search for answer(s) to this question leads us to the conclusion that these radical economists are gravely misreading the expansion; that such misreading stems, among other reasons, from serious theoretical and methodological weaknesses; and that significant policy and/or political implications can follow from such dubious assessments and judgments.

Keywords

United States Economic expansion Long wave approach

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bowles, Samuel and Richard Edwards . 1993. Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change in the U.S. Economy, second edition. New York: Harper Collins.

Brenner, Robert . 1998. Uneven Development and the Long Downturn: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Boom to Stagnation, 1950-1998. New Left Review 229 (May-June).

Day, Richard B. 1976. The Theory of Long Waves: Kondratierff, Trotsky, Mandel. New Left Review 99: 67-82.

Fine, Ben et al. 1999. Addressing the World Economy: Two Steps Back. Capital and Class 67 (Spring): 47-90.

Goldstein, Joshua S. 1988. Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Gordon, David , Richard Edwards , and Michael Reich . 1994. Long Waves and Stages of Capitalism. In Social Structures of Accumulation. Kotz et al. (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gordon, David , Thomas Weisskopf , and Samuel Bowles . 1996. Power, Accumu-lation, and Crisis: The Rise and Demise of the Postwar Social Structure of Accumulation. In Lippit (ed.). Pp. 226-246.

Henwood, Doug . 1998. Crisis Update. Left Business Observer 85 (September).

Kleinknecht, Alfred , Ernest Mandel , and Immanual Wallerstein (eds.). 1992. New Findings in Long Wave Research. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin's Press.

10.

Kotz, David , Terrence McDonough , and Michael Reich . 1994. Social Structure of Accumulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11.

Lippit, Victor . 1997. The Reconstruction of a Social Structure of Accumulation in the United States. Review of Radical Political Economics 29 (3): 11-21.

12.

Lippit, Victor .(ed.). 1996. Radical Political Economy: Explorations in Alternative Economic Analysis. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.

13.

Malloy, Mary and Charlie Post . 1999. Understanding the Uneven Capitalist Development: A Reply to Robert Brenner. Against the Current 79 (March-April):36-38.

14.

Mandel, Ernest . 1980. The Long Waves of Capitalist Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

15.

McDonough, Terrence . 1994. The Construction of Social Structure of Accumulation in U.S. History. In Social Structure of Accumulation. Kotz et al. (ed.).

16.

Moseley, Fred . 1999. The United States Economy at the Turn of the Century: Entering a New Era of Prosperity? Capital and Class 67 (Spring): 25-45.

17.

O'Hara, Phillip A. 2000. A New Social Structure of Accumulation or Financial Instability and Deep Recession for the United States. Unpublished paper.

18.

Yaghmaian, Behzad . 1998. Globalization and the State: The Political Economy of Global Accumulation and Its Emerging Mode of Regulation. Science and Society 62 (2): 241-265.

19.

Yates, Michael . 1994. Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States. New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review Press.